Joseph Altman (1925 – 2016) was an
American biologist who worked in the field of
neurobiology
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, developmen ...
.
First years
Born in
Hungary
Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croa ...
to a Jewish family, he survived
The Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
and migrated with his family via Germany and Australia to the United States. In these places, he sought employment as a librarian and used the opportunity to inform himself reading books about psychology, human behavior, psychoanalysis, and human brain structure. In New York, where he married his first wife Elizabeth Altman, he became a graduate student in psychology in the laboratory of Hans-Lukas Teuber, earning a PhD.,in 1959 from New York University. That degree launched his scientific career, first as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, next at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and finally at Purdue University. During his career, he collaborated closely with his second wife, Shirley A. Bayer. From the early 1960s to 2016, he published many articles in peer-reviewed journals, books, monographs, and online free books that emphasized developmental processes in brain anatomy and function.
Discovery of adult neurogenesis
Joseph Altman discovered
adult neurogenesis, the creation of new
neuron
A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an membrane potential#Cell excitability, electrically excitable cell (biology), cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous ...
s in the adult brain, in the 1960s. As an independent investigator at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
, his results were largely ignored, by his account, in favor of
Pasko Rakic
Pasko Rakic ( hr, Paško Rakić, ) is a Yugoslav-born American neuroscientist, who presently works in the Yale School of Medicine Department of Neuroscience in New Haven, Connecticut. His main research interest is in the development and evolutio ...
's findings that neurogenesis is limited to pre-natal development. By the late 1990s, a
paradigm shift
A paradigm shift, a concept brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Even though Kuhn restricted ...
had occurred. The fact that the
brain
The brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It consists of nervous tissue and is typically located in the head ( cephalization), usually near organs for special ...
can create new neurons even into adulthood was rediscovered by
Elizabeth Gould in 1999, leading it to be one of the hottest fields in
neuroscience
Neuroscience is the science, scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a Multidisciplinary approach, multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, an ...
. Adult neurogenesis has recently been proven to occur in the
dentate gyrus
The dentate gyrus (DG) is part of the hippocampal formation in the temporal lobe of the brain, which also includes the hippocampus and the subiculum. The dentate gyrus is part of the hippocampal trisynaptic circuit and is thought to contribute ...
, olfactory bulb and striatum through the measurement of Carbon-14—the levels of which changed during nuclear bomb testing throughout the 20th century—in postmortem human brains.
Awards
* 2011
Prince of Asturias Award
The Princess of Asturias Awards ( es, Premios Princesa de Asturias, links=no, ast, Premios Princesa d'Asturies, links=no), formerly the Prince of Asturias Awards from 1981 to 2014 ( es, Premios Príncipe de Asturias, links=no), are a series of a ...
for Technical and Scientific Research.
* 2012
International Prize for Biology
The is an annual award for "outstanding contribution to the advancement of research in fundamental biology." The Prize, although it is not always awarded to a biologist, is one of the most prestigious honours a natural scientist can receive. Ther ...
See also
*
André Gernez
André Gernez (25 January 1923 – 8 January 2014) was a French physician, Oncologist, and Radiologist.
*
Cerebellum
The cerebellum (Latin for "little brain") is a major feature of the hindbrain of all vertebrates. Although usually smaller than the cerebrum, in some animals such as the mormyrid fishes it may be as large as or even larger. In humans, the cere ...
*
Hungary in World War II
During World War II, the Kingdom of Hungary was a member of the Axis powers.[Stem cell
In multicellular organisms, stem cells are undifferentiated or partially differentiated cells that can differentiate into various types of cells and proliferate indefinitely to produce more of the same stem cell. They are the earliest type of ...](_blank)
References
External links
Neuron Development– Joseph Altman's research
*
1925 births
2016 deaths
American neuroscientists
Massachusetts Institute of Technology people
Purdue University people
Indiana University people
Hungarian emigrants to the United States
Hungarian expatriates in Germany
Hungarian expatriates in Australia
New York University alumni
Columbia University staff
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